“Apple gets a huge amount of positive media coverage. Far more than it deserves. The company is the number one tech story, yet it only accounts for somewhere between 2% and 3% of the PC market,” Bill Bennett writes for New Zealand Reseller News. “Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Toshiba and Dell are all commercially more important. They have more customers, sell more computers and impact more lives. But collectively they don’t get as much news coverage as Apple. Microsoft gets as much coverage. In a grudging way it also gets the same level of respect. But it doesn’t get reverence.”
“When Apple clamps down on enthusiastic fans leaking details of new products on its website, the media meekly accepts the company is protecting its turf. Microsoft is continually accused of bullying — often with justification, sometimes when there is none. Clearly double standards are operating here,” Bennett writes. “There’s a phrase in tech circles to explain this. People talk about the ‘reality distortion field’ surrounding Steve Jobs.”
Bennett writes, “It has to be said that Apple’s hardware products are better designed and nicer to use than anything made by any rival. The software is streets ahead of its competition. Journalists know this because they are the creative, right-brained customers Apple caters for. Perhaps this explains their interest in the brand… However, as far as its computer products are concerned, these days Apple is little more than just another PC manufacturer churning out Intel systems. Sure, it’s innovative, but it isn’t faultless, it isn’t perfect and it damn well doesn’t offer resellers higher-than-average margins. Apple doesn’t need to be put on a pedestal and worshipped.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews reader “Macaday” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: Apple, the visionary industry leader, demands the media’s attention and the derivative peddlers of mediocrity like Microsoft, Dell, HP, [name your box assembler] get far, far more press than more than they deserve. Bennett can’t believe that “Apple is little more than just another PC manufacturer churning out Intel systems.” Nobody’s that stupid; he has to be trolling for hits.
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Related MacDailyNews article:
John C. Dvorak expounds on pro-Mac, anti-Microsoft media bias – October 18, 2005
